A meltdown doesn't necessarily put any radioative particles into the air. If it did, that would be a very unusual event (such as Chernobyl). On the other hand, a bomb has a tendency to put an ultra-fine dust of uranium, various transuranics, and quite a few fission products into the atmosphere.

I suspect that you may be confusing a radioactive isotope (such as U235) with the particles associated with nuclear radiation (such as alpha and beta particles).

A meltdown will generally involve a lot of radioactive material. It will usually be localized and only very rarely pulverized into a dust. Chernobyl's steam explosion did this. The meltdown will probably also emit a lot of radiation, but that never "contaminates" the atmosphere, unless you consider electrons or helium "contamination".

Unfortunately, conflating radioactive isotopes with the radiation those isotopes emit when they decay is very common misunderstanding.

Sure, thank-you for clarifying. And I agree, it certainly is easy to mix-up the types of radiation.

But yes, I do consider particles like Iodine-129 and Cesium-137 "contamination".

> That's like comparing a lit-match to a gas pipeline fire.

That's a terrible analogy. Radioactivity, a nuclear reaction, deals with totally different physics and phenomena than combustion, a chemical reaction.

A more proper analogy would be: Would you rather me shoot you with a cannonball once right now, or would you rather me split it up into a million little BB pellets and shoot one at you a day?

I'd choose the million little BB pellets a day because my body can recover from that in between. Likewise, your body constantly repairs DNA damaged by the sun or from other radiation sources.

Radiation, activity, and dosages are extremely difficult to keep straight. Especially when coming from the media. Not even units can help you (ex: Equivalent vs Effective Dose), and it is hard to keep straight (ICRP vs NRC).

> Only the fire doesn't end - because we don't have the technology to stop it, and perhaps will not ever.

I am not quite sure what you're referring to -- stick yourself in a heavily-lined lead chamber and I'm sure you will measure far less gamma radiation inside of it than outside.

> So no, I don't agree - likely the number is much less than 507 and uncomfortably close to the number of plants already in disaster-mode.

Then we can agree to disagree -- it seems you have already made your mind on how many plants are close to "disaster mode" (unsure what that really means in an engineering sense).

Hang on, do you think the fissible material from a bomb just vanishes? It is just hurled across a bigger area due to the fact that a bomb explodes.

Exactly what level of physics education do you have?

I have no physics education, I'm using common sense. They don't design bombs like they do core reactors. Bombs are intended to explode immediately, reactors are intended to help produce power for a very long time.

But hey, I'm listening - show me a chart that compares the total amount of ionizing radiation released into the atmosphere by bombs dropped on Nagasaki & Hiroshima versus the amount produced already by the Fukishima site.

Please don't use 'common sense' and talk about how they design bombs and core reactors when you have no physics education. But hey, I'll humour you with as crude comparison as I can string together in a few minutes.

This link [1] roughly compares Chernobyl to a Fat Man equivalent, which had a 21kT yield, or 0.021 MT. That's 0.003% of the total yield of all the atomic tests mankind has conducted (545MT total [2]).

So by a first cut of the numbers, we've set of 26,000 Fat Man equivalents. Even considering that Caesium ratio of 890:1 between Chernobyl to Fat Man, that's over 29 Chernobyls worth of the stuff flung out. Pick any of the other ratios and it looks worse for your argument.

Oh, and on the note of you freaking out about the amount of radiation that Fukishima is dumping into the Pacific and how it's screwing up all the ocean life, remember that about 10% of all of those explosions were detonated into the ocean half-way between the US and Japan.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Chernobyl_and_ot...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests#...

>Please don't use 'common sense' and talk about how they design bombs and core reactors when you have no physics education.

If I can step back from mrschwabe's immediate questions, I'd like to point out how problematic your attitude is, NamTaf.

Nuclear power generation in the West is a political question. Which means its future is going to be decided by the average voter. The average voter is not going to have a "physics education". Maybe they took high-school physics[1], and maybe that class touched on radiation and nuclear power generation. But odds are, even in that case, the average voter doesn't really remember it.

I just checked my alma mater's undergraduate physics course catalog, and nuclear physics is an upper-division topic. It is unacceptable, in a democratic society, to suggest that voters have the right to an opinion on a topic of importance to society only if they've taken upper-division university classes on the topic in question.

The real failure isn't that mrschwabe doesn't have a physics education. The failure is that, 66 years after nuclear criticality was first used to power a light bulb, the physics/nuclear power advocate community hasn't figured out how to incorporate the basics of nuclear power generation into the average person's "common sense".

[1]Obligatory disclaimer about this being a U.S.-centric post. I'll let others comment on the quality of secondary-level physics instruction in other countries.

I'm not so convinced it's a purely political issue. I think there's equal parts of bureaucracy and technology in there too. Bureaucracy via the costs associated to run and maintain a plant, given the incredible red tape put in place, and technology in that to myk nowledge even the newest gen4 designs don't neatly and completely resolve the objections people have to them.

Are they good enough? Sure. They're good enoguh to convince anyone with an open mind. But they're not the problem. None of them are yet to the point to convince the person who is inherently against nuclear power. It's not yet at the stage where we can throw in some stuff, have it do its nuclear thing and produce energy, then do something very simple, easy, an un-fuck-upable such that there is no problematic waste at the end.

Maybe the technological aspect is political in disguise. I mean, it's easier to point at containers of nuclear waste than it is the airbourne pollutants that coal spews out. But I think you'll find that the easier solution to that problem comes from an improved technology that renders it null and void, rather than a change of political will. Particularly when semi-alternatives in the form of the various renewables exist and provide a much bigger attraction to the nuclear detractors even despite their flaws.

Well I appreciate you putting these numbers and links together. I certainly have some reading to do.

Only 217 Mt of tests has been from fission bombs; fusion bombs contain a much smaller amount of radioactive material relative to their yield.

That's a very fair point.

>I have no physics education, I'm using common sense.

That's a mistake. "Common sense", or the mental picture of "how things work" you've built up over a lifetime is utterly useless when it comes to nuclear devices. Things that common sense will tell you are super dangerous really aren't, and conversely things that common sense tells you should be safe are not at all safe.

The bombs dropped on Japan in World War II (Little Boy and Fat Man) were firecrackers compared to many of the thousands tested since then, which still haven't rendered our planet anywhere near uninhabitable.